Blu Posted March 8, 2011 Author Share Posted March 8, 2011 So basically it sort of runs as a JBOD? I thought it would show up under my network drives has one large drive that would be 40TB in space (minus the parity drive). So to be able to do this will need to go through all the drives and make the folders I want and then just fill each hard drive one by one. I really thought unraid was sorta like a fault protection system that if one drive died you could replace it (unraid tells you what drive failed as well right?) and then it would put the data that was on the failed drive back on it like nothing had happened. This sorta makes me upset cause I thought unraid was a good way to protect your files on a file server, correct me if I'm lost here cause I did think it would rebuild the drive that failed. Also should I get a small SSD for a cache drive? making it 21 drives in total would that work? Or would a larger drive be better for the cache, and if it really matters if it's a good drive or not I might just pick up two 2TB Blacks, one for cache one for parity. Hows that sound?. Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 8, 2011 Share Posted March 8, 2011 Read i again. "The parity drive and all other disks can be used to recreate a single failed disk." "The user shares can be used to pool both the data and the free available space on all the disks into one network location." The user shares will create the directories as necessary to make use of the disks. If you use a cache disk then the speed of the parity disk really does not matter. In other words, a black cache means the writes might be slower but they happen at 3am so it does not matter if they go a little slower. Peter Quote Link to comment
dgaschk Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 A single user share will show the sum total of all disks assigned to that share (all disks by default). If you have 20 2T drives you can have a single share of 40T. Any particular file will reside on a single disk but on which disk the file resides is chosen automatically by unRAID based on configuration. Quote Link to comment
mazma Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 I've been using unRaid as a media server just fine for a little while now and it works like a charm. The only issues I've had are a failed disk and the Gigabyte HPA issue. In both cases unRaid kept my data safe whilst the causes were fixed. I'm guessing what I'm trying to say is that with unRaid and the great information and support found on these forums, I can't see how you could go wrong. Highly recommended. Just my 2 cents. Quote Link to comment
Blu Posted March 9, 2011 Author Share Posted March 9, 2011 A single user share will show the sum total of all disks assigned to that share (all disks by default). If you have 20 2T drives you can have a single share of 40T. Any particular file will reside on a single disk but on which disk the file resides is chosen automatically by unRAID based on configuration. Ok so the unRaid array will show up under network drives as one big 40TB drive (minus the parity so 38TB) ? Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 No, you can have 20 data disks plus the parity plus a cache disk for a total of 22 disks. So, you can presently have 40T of data space. The maximum will jump to 60T once 3T disks can used and it unRAID may support 24 data disk arrays in the near future too. Peter Quote Link to comment
Blu Posted March 9, 2011 Author Share Posted March 9, 2011 So under my computer and networked drives I would have 20 different drives there? I thought I would just have one large drive like raidz does. Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 It could be both or either one. Peter Quote Link to comment
dgaschk Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 A user share with 20 2T data drives will appear as a single 40T share. There is also the option to have disk shares that appear as individual disks on the network. Quote Link to comment
Blu Posted March 9, 2011 Author Share Posted March 9, 2011 If it showed up as 20 drives wouldn't it be easier to just use 10 drives and mirror them with the other ten and sync it every night say? How long would it take to rebuild a failed hard drive if the share was 40TB? I would more less just want it to be one large share that's safe and protected from failure and is nice clean and tidy without 20 different drives to run through. Quote Link to comment
dyrewolfe Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 If it showed up as 20 drives wouldn't it be easier to just use 10 drives and mirror them with the other ten and sync it every night say? How long would it take to rebuild a failed hard drive if the share was 40TB? I would more less just want it to be one large share that's safe and protected from failure and is nice clean and tidy without 20 different drives to run through. . RAID-1 isn't possible with unRAID. Think of it as a parity protected JBOD. Rebuilding a single drive under unRAID should take just as long with a 4 disk array as it would with a 20 disk array. When you create a share under unRAID, you have the ability to include or exclude disks in that share. By default, it's going to use all data disks for that share. In your case, unless you specify only certain disks to be included in the share, you would have a 40TB share. You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to shares. Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted March 9, 2011 Share Posted March 9, 2011 Blu - I suggest you spend some time reading the wiki and stickies at the top of the general support forum. If you are going to invest in a 20 drive server you need to understand the ins and outs. There are good reasons NOT to setup your server as one giant share which you need to understand. But first, at the most basic level, you need to understand the protections that unRaid provides, and realize it is not a backup. Quote Link to comment
dgaschk Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 No RAID system is a backup. UnRAID, like a RAID system, can be used for backups. Quote Link to comment
Blu Posted March 10, 2011 Author Share Posted March 10, 2011 Blu - I suggest you spend some time reading the wiki and stickies at the top of the general support forum. If you are going to invest in a 20 drive server you need to understand the ins and outs. There are good reasons NOT to setup your server as one giant share which you need to understand. But first, at the most basic level, you need to understand the protections that unRaid provides, and realize it is not a backup. Would it be better/safer to do say 4 sets of 5 drives each? But then I would loose 4 drives to parity correct? I just would like my data to be safe in case of a failure and be able to rebuild in case of a failure. Also an odd question here, since it's going to be sorta hard to keep and know what drive is what in my pc does unRaid show the drives serial #? I was thinking of being able to write down the serials of the drives on the drive enclosures I plan on using and keep track of them that way. What would keep my data safer? a unRaid system or a Raidz system? I just want everything to be as safe as possible. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Blu - I suggest you spend some time reading the wiki and stickies at the top of the general support forum. If you are going to invest in a 20 drive server you need to understand the ins and outs. There are good reasons NOT to setup your server as one giant share which you need to understand. But first, at the most basic level, you need to understand the protections that unRaid provides, and realize it is not a backup. Would it be better/safer to do say 4 sets of 5 drives each? But then I would loose 4 drives to parity correct? I just would like my data to be safe in case of a failure and be able to rebuild in case of a failure. You would need 4 unRAID servers. unRAID can have only 1 array per server, and 1 parity drive. Also an odd question here, since it's going to be sorta hard to keep and know what drive is what in my pc does unRaid show the drives serial #? I was thinking of being able to write down the serials of the drives on the drive enclosures I plan on using and keep track of them that way. Yes, it does. It also shows you have done very little reading about unRAID in these forums or you would have encountered at least one picture of its web-interface. The disk serial numbers are very evident. Time for you to do the homework we asked you to do. You seem to want to spend money on a solution you do not have a clue about. That is wrong in so many ways. Joe L. Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Time for you to do the homework we asked you to do. You seem to want to spend money on a solution you do not have a clue about. That is wrong in so many ways. Was trying to think of a way to say this when you beat me to it. I 100% agree. Blu1 - a lot of people spent a lot of time organizing a lot of material to be easy to find and read so we would not have to spoon feed every new user the basics of unRAID. Take advantage of that and THEN ask questions on the loose ends. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Time for you to do the homework we asked you to do. You seem to want to spend money on a solution you do not have a clue about. That is wrong in so many ways. Was trying to think of a way to say this when you beat me to it. I 100% agree. Blu1 - a lot of people spent a lot of time organizing a lot of material to be easy to find and read so we would not have to spoon feed every new user the basics of unRAID. Take advantage of that and THEN ask questions on the loose ends. In his defense, I looked at the main lime-technology web-site and found no illustrations of the web-management interface. I'm fairly certain they used to be there... but I did not see them. Nor are they in the official manual. It has text descriptions of the screens, but not the screens. A picture of the main web-management screen is in this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11617.msg110804#msg110804 Joe L. Quote Link to comment
dgaschk Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 If it showed up as 20 drives wouldn't it be easier to just use 10 drives and mirror them with the other ten and sync it every night say? You can do this if you configure rsync to execute as a cron job, but why would you want to waste 50% of the capacity? See below... Would it be better/safer to do say 4 sets of 5 drives each? But then I would loose 4 drives to parity correct? I just would like my data to be safe in case of a failure and be able to rebuild in case of a failure. Share configuration has no impact on parity based recovery. If any single drive fails, the combination of the bits on every drive, including parity, is used the first emulate the failed drive and then rebuild the contents of the missing drive. When a drive fails, unRAID will continue to operate as if the failed drive still works; the contents of the missing drive will still be available and the only way that you'll know that the drive has failed is because you check the web interface or receive an e-mail from the unRAID system. Please read up on how parity based protection works and unRAID in general. Please read up on how parity Quote Link to comment
graywolf Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Would it be better/safer to do say 4 sets of 5 drives each? But then I would loose 4 drives to parity correct? I just would like my data to be safe in case of a failure and be able to rebuild in case of a failure. I think part of the issue is confusion on terminology. Arrays vs Shares. Array = entire collection of disks, parity and data disks. Shares = there are 2 types and both can be used at same time or just 1 or the other...your choice. Disk shares where your windows/mac would see each disk as a folder User Share(s) where your windows/mac would see each User Share as a seperate folder. Each User Share can comprise of 1 or more disks. So you could have a User Share called Movies, another called Music, another called Pictures (etc). If you wanted, you could have Movies use 10 disks, Music 2 disks, Pictures 1 disk...or any/all of them could use all the disks. User Shares are just LOGICAL representation of a set of disk(s). Quote Link to comment
Blu Posted March 14, 2011 Author Share Posted March 14, 2011 Would a User Share recover well from a drive failure very well? I just want to go the safeest route for my data basically, but using the least amount of drives. I do not want to go full on raid 10 for this either. I like how you explain the Usershares, that's perfectly what I want to do. Have about 14 2TB Drives for HD Movies, 4 2TB Drives for gaming and then 2 2TB drives for music/pictures, and could each of these shares get there own parity or no just one large one? Also how does a cache drive help me in this case? I've been reading up and have seen people mentioning using them and such. Quote Link to comment
aaronwt Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 I recently finished my final testing on my unRAID setup. I set up a small array with five data drives, a cache drive, and a parity drive. I then had around 3TB of data in around a dozen test folders on the array using the default High Water method. I then removed the parity drive and replaced it, and it was rebuilt with no issues. Then I replaced one data drives and replaced that. It was also rebuilt with no issues. I've always tested my RAID setups to see what it does if I lose a drive. So Now I curretly have 16 drives in my array using a PCI Express x4, port multiplier Rosewill RC-218 card and four external 4 bay cases. Once my PCI Express x1 card shows up I will install four more drives in my main case to bring me up to the max of 20 drives in the array. Quote Link to comment
dgaschk Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 Would a User Share recover well from a drive failure very well? I just want to go the safeest route for my data basically, but using the least amount of drives. I do not want to go full on raid 10 for this either. I like how you explain the Usershares, that's perfectly what I want to do. Have about 14 2TB Drives for HD Movies, 4 2TB Drives for gaming and then 2 2TB drives for music/pictures, and could each of these shares get there own parity or no just one large one? Also how does a cache drive help me in this case? I've been reading up and have seen people mentioning using them and such. Share configuration has no impact on parity based recovery. If any single drive fails, the combination of the bits on every drive, including parity, is used the first emulate the failed drive and then rebuild the contents of the missing drive. When a drive fails, unRAID will continue to operate as if the failed drive still works; the contents of the missing drive will still be available and the only way that you'll know that the drive has failed is because you check the web interface or receive an e-mail from the unRAID system. Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted March 15, 2011 Share Posted March 15, 2011 Would a User Share recover well from a drive failure very well? If a drive failed, unRAID would simulate its contents. The content of the user share would appear the same, although performance would suffner. If a second disk failed you'd lose the data on the first failed disk and the second failed disk. unRAID's has no ability to recover from more than one simultaneous disk failure. A user share is nothing but a convenient way to VIEW your data. It makes it look like files that are stored in different drives in subdirectories of the same name are all stored together. But they are not. Recovery is at the physical disk level, and NOT at the user share level. I just want to go the safeest route for my data basically, but using the least amount of drives. I do not want to go full on raid 10 for this either. The decision to use RAID-1, RAID-5, RAID-6, RAID-10, unRAID, or something else is your choice. There are performance, protection and cost implicaitons to each. unRAID is definitely on the moderate protection, less performance, lowest cost end of the spectrum. It's primary benefit over something like RAID-5 is its abiility to recover a single disk failure, and in cases of multiple disk failure, you only lose the data on the disks that fail, not the entire array. But there is no free lunch! Clearly RAID-1 would offer more protection than unRAID. And none of the solutions are backing up your data to protect you from data loss (for example, if your house burned down, you'd lose all of your data without an off-site backup). I like how you explain the Usershares, that's perfectly what I want to do. Have about 14 2TB Drives for HD Movies, 4 2TB Drives for gaming and then 2 2TB drives for music/pictures, and could each of these shares get there own parity or no just one large one? No. Unit of recovery is physical disk. Do not use the word recovery in the same sentence as "user share" and you'll be fine. Also how does a cache drive help me in this case? I've been reading up and have seen people mentioning using them and such. Cache is an unprotected disk in the unRAID server. It can be configured so that when you copy data to the array, unRAID first copies it to the cache disk, and later (in the middle of the night), copies the cache disk contents to the protected array. Should your cache disk fail between the time you copy data to it, and the time it copies data to the array, the data is lost. Quote Link to comment
jeff.lebowski Posted March 15, 2011 Share Posted March 15, 2011 Ok so the unRaid array will show up under network drives as one big 40TB drive (minus the parity so 38TB) ? When I navigate to Network Neighborhood, I see two workstations, a lappy, an HTPC, and Tower. When I open Tower, I see seven User Shares. Within each User Share is the folder directory I setup for easy locating of files. BBC.Madagascar is a recent new folder within the TV User Share. I also have mapped TV and Movies directly from Total Commander as they are the most visited User Shares. Quote Link to comment
CompAudioOne Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 I'm working on acquiring all the components for the 20 Drive Beast. So far I have enough 2TB hard drives to begin with (10), a Norco 4220 case, Intel Core i3-540 CPU & Corsair 650TX PSU. To help keep initial costs down can I purchase (1) Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI Express x4 controller card & install on the Supermicro MBD-X8SIL-F-O to begin with? Then when future growth is needed (e.g. if need to install more drives) can I easily just add a second controller card, without rebuilding server? Or would there be a lot of reconfiguring to do? Quote Link to comment
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